Didactic Strategies to Develop Citizenship in Childhood

There can be no citizenship without daily democracy every day.

Ralph Nader

According to the Academic Collective of Pedagogical Action of Teachers, there are various strategies to develop necessary values among children for citizenship such as teamwork, responsibility, empathy, respect or dialogue. The work of these allows the children to live a collaborative, participative and democratic environment in the classroom in a constant manner.

Much of the strategies are taken from Freinet techniques proposed by the French educator Celestine Freinet (1896-1966) and support the enculturation of students (subject-world relationship, Sacristan, 2001). Among the mentioned techniques are:

• School assembly: It consists of a meeting that takes place with the students in order to make agreements that benefit the whole group to resolve a conflict or situation close to them.
• List pass: It consists of using a cardboard or a few meters of fabric to divide it into columns that will have the indicators: name, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It helps students to locate themselves spatially in the graphics plane and temporarily in the personal field.
• Meteorological chart: Consists of recording on a piece of cloth or paperboard the weather during the week at three different times of the day (at the entrance, at recess, and at the exit). It helps children to be spatially located on the graphics plane and temporarily in the conventional field.

• School correspondence: It allows exchanging thoughts, experiences or ideas to a child from another school context of the same age. This exchange generates expectation and emotion which allows students to express them in writing about what they decide towards a real recipient from whom they obtain a response in a certain time.
• The school diary: Consists of a group notebook to write experiences both inside and outside the school. This activity allows the student to self-evaluate and correct.
• The school newspaper: It is a space in the room where news is placed that can be personal, school, television, radio, magazines or newspapers. It favors the analysis of the information, the synthesis, the ordering of the thought and the development of its oral and written capacity.
• The living corner: Space of the classroom where plants or another living being are placed as a fish. Those responsible for caring for it are girls and boys; what favors the responsibility, organization and the taking of agreements because they will have to assign roles.
• Agenda: This strategy allows establishing the organization of the times and the activities that are developed throughout the project. By carrying it out, the development of notions such as personal and conventional temporality in girls and boys is favored; as well as the development of autonomy to promote the commitment and responsibility acquired in each of the activities.
• Children’s Conference: The children exposed in front of their classmates the result of their research and previous work on a subject chosen by him with the help of his parents. This activity develops safety, responsibility, autonomy and critical thinking when self-evaluating and evaluating their peers.

At school, it is possible to work on these strategies that will support the development of concepts, skills, and attitudes in girls and boys to form better citizens from childhood.

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Likewise, the way in which content is organized for work in the classroom will impact on this objective; we consider that organizing them in a globalized way will support the cognitive, psychological and affective development of the child; the school must not only prepare for life but be part of life; make it a democratic community.